1. Marx asserts that self-maintenance by property owners causes modern dictatorship
1. why is democracy unstable in France after 1848--i.e., how does Louis Bonaparte defeat parliamentary institutions established in February 1848?
1. suppose first that the political institutions of a society depend on approval or disapproval by the people in a society
1. then Marx's question is, who approves the dictatorship?
2. this is not the same as whether they vote for it
2. suppose second that society is divided into economic classes defined by how their members make their living
1. proletariat composed of factory workers who sell their labor for a wage that enables them barely to subsist
2. petty bourgeoisie composed of small property holders whose own labor enables them to barely maintain themselves and their families
1. an urban petty bourgeoisie composed of shopkeepers
2. a rural petty bourgeoisie composed of small farmers, or peasants
3. a capitalist bourgeoisie composed of people who profit from employing others
1. an urban bourgeoisie called capital
1. factory owners
2. bankers and financiers
2. a landed bourgeoisie operating large agricultural enterprises
4. residual category called "lumpenproletariat" composed of people facing unemployment (note: not a class, because no fixed means of making a living)
3. suppose third that each of the classes, except the peasantry, has a political organization that represents it, but lumpenproletarians don’t because they’re not a class
4. suppose fourth that members of social classes decide among political institutions by considering what institutions will establish the most favorable conditions for the means of making a living common to the members of their economic class
1. not an assumption of self-interest
1. self-interest would be an assumption that each person made political choices by considering what actions would be most favorable for himself or herself
2. Marx assumes that people choose by considering what conditions are most favorable for their economic class
3. Marx also assumes that only he knows how people choose
2. classes will differ in their attitude toward property
1. proletarians, who own no property, oppose institutions guaranteeing private property
2. all other classes favor institutions guaranteeing property
3. but commitment to property is weaker among the smallholders
1. rural smallholders are deeply in debt
2. urban smallholders do not employ workers and are less afraid of proletarians
4. bourgeoisie itself is divided
1. a landed bourgeoisie wants high prices for farm products and low prices for factory products
2. a financial and industrial bourgeoisie wants high prices for factory products and low prices for farm products
5. lumpenproletarians, having no means of making a living, also have no political attitudes
2. consequences for choice between democratic and dictatorial institutions
1. at stage one, bourgeoisie and petty bourgeoisie will ally in defense of institutions guaranteeing property against the proletariat
1. although the proletariat can outfight the bourgeois alliance, the bourgeoisie can use money to hire lumpenproletarians to serve in the army
2. alliance of the bourgeoisie and petty bourgeoisie will result in laws prohibiting organization of the proletariat
2. at stage two, bourgeoisie will conflict with the urban petty bourgeoisie
1. petty bourgeoisie can protect itself in politics by virtue of its superior numbers
2. but constitutional rights that empower the petty bourgeoisie are even more advantageous to the proletariat
3. therefore bourgeoisie ousts the petty bourgeoisie when petty bourgeoisie surrenders its constitutional rights because of its fear of the proletariat
3. at stage three, conflict begins that pits financial and industrial bourgeoisie against the political representatives of the bourgeoisie
1. bourgeoisie fears that disagreements between parliament and president, or within parliament, will result in letting the proletarians back in (pp 104-106)
2. Lacking the support of any class, political representatives of the bourgeoisie lose their capacity to achieve political purposes
3. They may not want to withdraw from politics but are incapable of resisting their own removal
4. at stage four, rural petty bourgeoisie is in conflict with financial bourgeoisie that holds mortgages on their farm land
1. peasants living on isolated farms cannot act together for their own benefit
2. consequently peasants need someone else to oppose the parliament dominated by the Party of the bourgeoisie
3. because of repression, proletarians are unavailable
4. the dictator is the other opponent of the bourgeoisie
3. Thus the initial suppression of the proletarians cascades into dictatorship
1. urban petty bourgeoisie cannot maintain itself against bourgeoisie because it has already acquiesced in the suppression of the proletariat, which otherwise could be an effective ally
2. rural petty bourgeoisie hopes dictator will protect it against bourgeoisie
3. the bourgeoisie distrusts its own political representatives
4. Simple way of thinking about politics
1. you and four others persons are trapped in a room
2. you must fight, because your survival depends on the others and each of you is unalterably hostile to the survival of the others in the long run
1. The structure of the narrative in Marx parallels that of a reality TV show
3. what is your strategy?
1. four of you gang up on the fifth
2. three of you gang up on the fourth
3. two of you gang up on the third
4. when you are in the last pair, you let the other do the fighting so that the other will be weakened when the two of you conflict
5. Extended applicability: The German case:
1. four political parties
1. "Nationalists" represent the factory owners
2. "Nazis" represent farmers
3. "Socialists" represent urban petty bourgeois and some factory workers
4. "Communists" represent the rest of factory workers
5. in addition there are many urban unemployed
2. unalterable antagonism: street battles in Weimar republic
3. sequential elimination
1. Nationalists, Nazis and Socialists pass a law against the Communists
2. Nationalists and Nazis outlaw the Socialists
3. Nazis force the Nationalists to resign from parliament
4. Nazis create jobs for the unemployed by public works and expansion of armed forces
5. Germany cascades into dictatorship
2. Components of the argument
1. Initial "stylization," or reduction of the problem to generalities capable of being contemplated
1. Marx's "stylized fact"
1. Marx (21-4) (or more clearly pp. 116-117): three phases of the French revolution
1. Feb 24-May 4 l848: provisional government resulting from concealed disagreement among the social classes
2. from the suppression of the proletariat between May and June by the National Assembly representing the bourgeoisie until end of May 1949 formation of parliament: "the domination and disintegration of the republican faction of the bourgeoisie"
3. conflict in parliament between the two opposing monarchist factions of the bourgeoisie, May 1849-December 1851
2. Is it true? Marx doesn’t care
1. by assumption, political events and personages are expressions of class action
2. every time politics changes, class actions must have changed
2. Stylized "definition of the problem"
1. Weber: "It will be our task to investigate...."
2. Marx 21: "It remains to be explained how a nation of thirty-six millions can be surprised and delivered unresisting into captivity by three chevaliers d'industrie."
3. how can a few rule a great many?
3. Stylized answer: Marx (25): "the republic signifies in general only the political form of revolution of bourgeois society and not its conservative form of life" unless classes "continually change and interchange their elements in constant flux"
1. "republic" here refers to what we would call democracy
2. "conservative form of life" is permanency
2. Elaboration of the answer involves three stages
1. statement of a hypothesis relating a "dependent variable" to one or more "independent variables"
2. construction of the dependent variable, in this case establishment of a dictatorship
3. display of association between the dependent variable and the independent variable or variable, in this case class interest
3. Marx's hypothesis (25): "Society is saved just as often as the circle of its rulers contracts, as a more exclusive interest is maintained against a wider one."
1. This can be restated as an "if-then proposition": If and only if "society is saved," then "the circle of its rulers contracts"
2. dependent variable is whether the circle of rulers is large or small, i.e., whether the state is a democracy or a dictatorship
3. independent variable is whether "property, religion, family, order" are preserved, that is, whether the class interest of the bourgeoisie in maintaining property and order is asserted
4. "a universal association": this is not only a statement about France
5. "susceptible to observation"
1. successive exclusion of participants in rule
2. each exclusion welcomed by social classes as preserving property and order
4. Dependent variables are always constructed as phenomena contrasted to an "ideal of natural order"
1. ideal of natural order is what would naturally occur if the cause were absent
2. this is difficult to see in Marx, but apparent in his idea of "contradictions"
1. Marx (43-44:) "The period we have before us comprises the most motley mixture of crying contradictions... the collective will of the nation, as often as its speaks through universal suffrage, seeking its appropriate expression through the inveterate enemies of the interests of the masses...."
2. if not for interest in property, universal suffrage would not result in the elevation of an individual dictator
3. in the ideal natural order, once the circle of rulers had expanded, it would not contract
4. but in reality, class interest produces self-contradictory behavior in the form of voting to abolish the right to vote
5. "Independent variable" must vary on those criteria that distinguish the phenomenon from the natural background
1. is there something about class interest that makes self-contradictory behavior in politics likely?
1. factions and parties are but the expression of class interest
1. Look at Marx's analysis of what he calls the "Party of Order"
1. Representatives of the bourgeoisie formed two royalist factions, the Legitimists and the Orleanists (47-48): "what kept the two factions apart... was their material conditions of existence, two different kinds of property, it was the old contrast between town and country, the rivalry between capital and landed property.... If each side wished to effect the restoration of its own royal house against the other, that merely signified that each of the two great interests into which the bourgeoisie is split--landed property and capital--sought to restore its own supremacy and the subordination of the other."
2. Although each preferred a monarchy, these two factions combined into the Party of Order in support fo the republic only because their "domination over the classes of society...was only possible under the form of the parliamentary republic, for only under this form could the two great divisions of the French bourgeoisie unite...." (48)
3. Compare Marx's analysis of the earlier "republican faction of the bourgeoisie" which had been ineffective against the monarchy before 1848 because it "was not a faction of the bourgeoisie not held together by great common interests and marked off by specific conditions of production" but was instead merely a clique of intellectuals
2. Compare also his analysis of the Montagne ("Mountain") or democrats: "As against the coalesced bourgeoisie, a coalition between petty bourgeois and workers had been formed, the so-called social-democratic party.... epitomized in the fact that democratic-republican institutions are demanded as a means, not of doing away with the two extremes, labor and capital, but of weakening their antagonism and transforming it into harmony." (49)
2. Self-understanding is a consequence of class interests:
1. 48: "Upon the different forms of property, upon the social conditions of existence, rises an entire superstructure of distinct and peculiarly formed sentiments, illusions, modes of thought and views of life."
3. because parties express class interests that shape their self-understanding, each party's self-understanding is limited by the interest of its class
1. "the democrat, because he represents the petty bourgeoisie, that is, a transition class, in which the interests of two classes are simultaneously mutually blunted, imagines himself elevated above class antagonism generally." (54)
2. "What the bourgeoisie did not grasp...was the logical conclusion that its own parliamentary regime, that its political rule in general, was now also bound to meet with the general verdict of condemnation... its own interests dictate that it should be delivered from the danger of its own rule... in order to preserve its social power intact, its political power must be broken" (66)
4. because class interests blind political parties, the actions of political parties fail to pursue their own political advantage
1. "The proletarian party appears as an appendage of the petty-bourgeois-democratic party. It is betrayed and dropped by the latter.... The democratic party, in its turn, leans on the shoulders of the bourgeois-republic party. The bourgeois republicans no sooner believe themselves well established than they shake off the troublesome comrade and support themselves on the shoulders of the party of Order. The party of Order hunches its shoulders, lets the bourgeois republicans tumble and throws itself on the shoulders of armed force. It fancies it is still sitting on its shoulders when, one fine morning, it perceives that the shoulders have transformed themselves into bayonets." (42)
2. an individual dictator enables people to act in politics who cannot act for themselves
1. "Bonaparte represents a class... the small-holding peasants" (123)
1. peasants cannot act together because isolation from one another by their production technology
2. "Their representative must at the same time appear as their master... as an unlimited governmental power who protects them against the other clas ses" (124)
2. "But, above all, Bonaparte looks upon himself... as the representative of the lumpenproletariat.... whose prime consideration is to benefit itself...." (132)
6. Marx's distinctive conception of how social change can occur: the significance of political revolution
1. Every society is composed of classes
2. The type of society depends on what classes are dominant
3. A class remains dominant only if its form of property is preserved
4. Preservation of property depends on narrowing the circle of rulers
5. Changing the dominance of classes, and therefore forming a new type of society, depends on a widening of the circle of rulers by means of a political revolution
6. Forms of property (e.g., capitalism) have their origin in politics